Book review: Sidharthan Maunaguru. 2019. Marrying for a Future: Transnational Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages in the Shadow of War

Sidharthan Maunaguru’s evocative ethnography is both modern and classic. It deftly steps away from the tropes of arranged marriages and presumed structures while, simultaneously, reminding us of the enduring role of kin and relatedness in (re)building community and, above all, in suturing together a life from fragments of a world torn apart by violence. Through multi-sited fieldwork in Sri Lanka, India and Canada, Maunaguru details the wedding events and marriage process as it unfolds among Sri Lankan Tamil families, scattered in different parts of the world. In a context of lives and life-worlds torn apart by the violence of the civil war, and families and kin networks separated by physical distance as well as fear, mistrust and suspicions, the marriage process emerges as a way of ‘rekindling’ a fragmented community. Taking the reader through this process, the book details the characters, objects and spaces that are part of the transnational marriage process. This includes matchmakers, temporary spaces and sites where couples meet and where wedding rituals are performed, photographers who document the wedding and, finally, visa and immigration officers who use these documents to decide whether a marriage is genuine and grant visas for reunification of the couple.

Central to Maunaguru’s conceptualisation is the idea of the marriage process as what he calls an ‘in-between’ space. Differentiating it from Victor Turner’s notion of the liminal, as well as Bhabha’s configuration of hybrid spaces, Maunaguru views the ‘in-between as a zone through which certain transfigurations of life take place’ (p. 5) and one with potentiality for various imagined and actualised outcomes that can be traced within the marriage process. Although a means to escape the insecurity and destruction of war, the marriage contains both certainty and uncertainty, holding, at once, the promise of a future and its inherent unknowability. The sense of in-between—of certainty and uncertainty, and knowability and unknowability—is captured in the figures, spaces and documents that are encountered in and constitute the marriage process. For instance, in chapter 2, the ethnography focuses on matchmakers, used by Sri Lankan Tamil families to find prospective spouses for their sons and daughters. Not only has the war dispersed kin and friends to diverse locations, suspicions about collaborators and spies within families have disrupted the comfort of these networks. In these unfamiliar brokerage spaces, matchmakers use familiar methods (of inquiring about people, astrological compatibility and caste and ur or village considerations) along with new sources (educational documents) that help people reconnect with and trace their past while opening new potential outcomes for the future.

Similarly, chapter 3 offers a glimpse of the potential of the temporary sites and spaces, usually in India, where the matched couple is able to meet and spend time with each other, and where the wedding ceremony and associated rituals take place. The historical connections between the Tamil communities of India and Sri Lanka make these sites familiar, a way to reconnect with the past, but also offer possibilities and uncertainties about the future as a couple and their respective families enter new alliances. The remaining chapters take this theme forward, with wedding photographs taking on multiple ‘traditional’ and new roles: of witnessing the wedding, an intrinsic part of customary Tamil weddings, of capturing and holding the past, and as documentary proof for a future visa officer. In each of these chapters, thus, we find a tension between the past and the future, the familiar and the unknown as young couples and families navigate the marriage process. As Maunaguru puts it, the in-between zones, figures and documents ‘not only hold the potential for imagining multiple futures, connecting past and present, tracing familiar practices to re-relate to others, transfiguring the relationships, creating new relations, and tracing old ones, but also hold the potential for uncertain futures, surprises, failures and errors’ (p. 59). The fragments of ‘tradition’ and customary practices that are re-encountered in the marriage process present a connection to the past but assembling them together does not form a whole. Rather, each fragment is unique, representing a way of inhabiting the world and, crucially, with potential for the imagination of different futures.

What emerges here then, is the broader argument that in-between zones, such as the marriage process, are not temporary moments—that suspend each day into a kind of waiting. Instead, following Veena Das (2007), each day has the potential to become ‘eventful’ and, in this way, reconfigures subjectivity, kinship and social orders. This way of thinking offers new perspectives on not only kinship and marriage, but also on other areas in South Asian studies. In terms of the latter, the idea of the temporary as filled with multiple possibilities provides a counterpoint to the recent focus on ‘waiting’ in literatures on urban youth, education and on labour migration, which is largely conceptualised as a suspension of time. Although Maunaguru talks of uncertainty and hopes for a future in a larger context of war and associated disruption, much of it relates to marriage at large. If we take, as recent work has done, affect and exchange as entangled in all intimate encounters, then multiple possibilities and hopes for the future—and the consequent uncertainty of their actualisation and in what configuration—are embedded in all marriage processes and in their afterlives. Understandably, Maunaguru’s focus is ‘rekindling’ of community, but it would have been constructive to hear of the other kinds of hopes, aspirations and desires for the future that animate the marriage process, and how they interact. Such explorations, of (possibly) conflicting visions and imaginations of the future embedded in the marriage process would only further Maunaguru’s aim: of a study of South Asian kinship that does not privilege ‘rules’ and ‘structures’ and, instead, views relatedness to ‘be worked out, imagined and lived’ (p. 161) through processes and in-between zones.